The following article, which appeared in yesterday's USA Today, is adapted from my new book What's So Great About Christianity:
We seem to be witnessing an aggressive attempt by leading atheists to portray religion in general, and Christianity in particular, as the bane of civilization. Finding the idea of God incompatible with science and reason, these atheists also fault Christianity with fostering a breed of fanaticism comparable to Islamic radicalism. The proposed solution: a completely secular society, liberated from Christian symbols and beliefs.
This critique, which comes from best-selling atheist books, academic tracts and a sophisticated network of atheist organizations and media, can be disputed on its own terms. What it misses, however, is the larger story of how Christianity has shaped the core institutions and values of the USA and the West. Christianity is responsible even for secular institutions such as democracy and science. It has fostered in our civilization values such as respect for human dignity, human rights and human equality that even secular people cherish.
Consider science. Although there have been many civilizations in history, modern science developed in only one: Western civilization. And why? Because science is based on an assumption that is, at root, faith-based and theological. That is the assumption that the universe is rational and follows laws that are discoverable through human reason.
Science is based on what James Trefil calls the principle of universality. "It says that the laws of nature we discover here and now in our laboratories are true everywhere in the universe and have been in force for all time." Moreover, the laws that govern the universe seem to be written in the language of mathematics. Physicist Richard Feynman found this to be "a kind of miracle."
Why? Because the universe doesn't have to be this way. There's no particular reason the laws of nature that we find on Earth should also govern a star billions of light years away. There's no logical necessity for a universe that obeys rules, let alone mathematical ones. So where did Western man get this idea of a lawfully ordered universe? From Christianity.
Christians were the first ones who envisioned the universe as following laws that reflected the rationality of God the creator. These laws were believed to be accessible to man because man is created in the image of God and shares a spark of the divine reason. No wonder, then, that the first universities and observatories were sponsored by the church and run by priests.
No wonder also that the greatest scientists of the West - Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Boyle, Newton, Leibniz, Gassendi, Pascal, Mersenne, Cuvier, Harvey, Dalton, Faraday, Joule, Lyell, Lavoisier, Priestley, Kelvin, Ampere, Steno, Pasteur, Maxwell, Planck, Mendel, and Lemaitre - were Christians. Gassendi, Mersenne and Lamaitre were priests. Several of them viewed their research as demonstrating God's creative genius as manifested in his creation.
If modern science has Christian roots, so do our most basic political institutions and values. Consider Thomas Jefferson's famous assertion in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal." He claimed this was "self-evident," but one only has to look to history and to other cultures to see that it is not evident at all. Everywhere we see dramatic evidence of human inequality. Jefferson's point, however, was that human beings are moral equals. Every life has a worth no greater and no less than any other.
The preciousness and equal worth of every human life is a Christian idea. We are equal because we have been created equal in the eyes of God. This is an idea with momentous consequences. In ancient Greece and Rome, human life had very little value. The Spartans, for example, left weak children to die on the hillside. Greek and Roman culture was built on slavery.
Christianity banned infanticide and the killing of the weak and "dispensable," and even today Christian values are responsible for the moral horror we feel when we hear of such practices. Christianity initially tolerated slavery- a universal institution at the time - but gradually mobilized the moral and political resources to end it. From the beginning, Christianity discouraged the enslavement of fellow Christians. Slavery, the foundation of Greek and Roman civilization, withered and largely disappeared throughout medieval Christendom in the Middle Ages.
The first movements to abolish slavery completely occurred only in the West, and were led by Christians. In the modern era, first the Quakers and then the evangelical Christians demanded that since we are all equal in God's eyes, no man has the right to rule another man without his consent. This religious doctrine not only supplies the moral justification for anti-slavery but also for democracy. Yes, the idea of self-government is also rooted in the Christian assumption of human equality. One reason the atheist philosopher Nietzsche hated democracy is because he understood its religious foundation.
Consider finally modern notions of human rights - the right to freedom of conscience, or to property, or to marry and form a family, or to be treated equally before the law - as enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The universalism of this declaration is based on the particular teachings of Christianity. The premise is that all human lives have equal dignity and worth, but this is not the teaching of all the world's cultures and religions. Even so, it's appropriate that a doctrine Christian in origin should be universal in application. Christianity from the start promulgated its message as one for the whole world.
There are some atheists and even some Christians who admit that theism and Christianity have shaped the core institutions and values of America and the West. But now that we have these values, they say, why do we still need God and Christianity? Oddly enough, the answer is supplied by Nietzsche.
Nietzsche argued that since the Christian God is the foundation of Western values, the death of God must necessarily mean the erosion and ultimate collapse of those values. Remove the base and the whole building will slowly crumble. For a while, Nietzsche conceded, people would out of custom or habit continue to respect human life and treat people with equal dignity, but eventually there would be ferocious assaults on these values, and practices once unthinkable such as the killing of people deemed inferior or undesirable would once again occur. This is precisely what we have seen in our time, and Nietzsche predicted that it will only get worse.
If we cherish the distinctive ideals of Western civilization, and believe as I do that they have enormously benefited our civilization and our world, then whatever our religious convictions, we will not rashly try to hack at the religious roots from which they spring. On the contrary, we will not hesitate to acknowledge, not only privately but also publicly, the central role that Christianity has played and still plays in the things that matter most to us.
What's So Great About Christianity, Regnery, 2007
Reader Comments ( Page 2 of 15)
16. The christian history that i've read is different from that that you espouse. The christians have just as bloody of a past as any other religion and have killed billions of innocents for their beliefs. Look at the old testament. The Isrealites were told to kill every man women and child and even animals for their God. This is the same God in the new testament that tells us to turn the other cheek. There are either two Gods or as is more the case pick the one you want to support your immediate cause. Case in point this Iraq war. It's totally illegal and immoral but the fundamentalist christians think it's justified...they have for the moment chose the wrathful God of the old testament.
Rick at 10:27AM on Oct 23rd 2007
17. Come on. It's always funny when we hear how religion is threatened by atheists. Churches that control billions of dollars in property are so threatened by non-believers that they try to get Government sanction for their belifs.
Get real.
Any religion that feels threatened, or demands government recognition, seems to me have FAILED in getting their message across.
What wouldJesus Do? If y9ou go by Scripture, you can be damned sure he would not be pleading to the Romans to pass laws to proect His religion.
So what is the Religious "Right" so scared of atheists?
Because they have no answers.
Chris at 10:44AM on Oct 23rd 2007
18. How wrong can you people be?! Of course Thomas Jefferson owned slaves but he was opposed to the institution of slavery! He wanted to free his slaves but didn’t have the financial funds to do so. Also, he tried to abolish slavery in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence but it was taken out by other members in the final version.
The preciousness and equal worth of every human life is NOT a Christian idea! Buddhists believed that (and actually practiced it unlike the Christians) for a thousand years before Christianity was formed!
Why do people try to use Satan to prove God?! It makes no sense at all! These people talk about Satan and the devil more than God it is ridiculous! THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THE DEVIL OR THE BOGGIE MAN!! Morality is NOT a Christian idea! Jesus talks about the Good Samaritan who was around thousands of years before Christ! Saying that the Bible is right because it says so doesn’t make it true! It is the weakest argument ever presented.
"But by what authority do you call the Bible the Word of God? For this is the first point to be settled. It is not your calling it so that makes it so, any more than the Mahometans calling the Koran the Word of God makes the Koran to be so. The Popish Councils of Nice (Nicaea) and Laodicea, about 350 years after the time the person called Jesus Christ is said to have lived, voted the books that now compose what is called the New Testament to be the Word of God. This was done by yeas and nays, as we now vote a law. The Pharisees of the second temple, after the Jews returned from captivity in Babylon, did the same by the books that now compose the Old Testament, and this is all the authority there is, which to me is no authority at all. I am as capable of judging for myself as they were, and I think more so, because, as they made a living by their religion, they had a self-interest in the vote they gave."
- Thomas Paine
Ross at 10:44AM on Oct 23rd 2007
19. God made a perfect world and satan destroyed it and now wants to fool man again by telling him that a good world is achievable without God and through our own intelligence and efforts.
This kind of nonsense is exactly why we have a hard time believing anything you say. If God made a perfect world, why did he let one of his own creations, Satan, destroy it? Why, if God is so perfect, did he create our imperfection? Why did God create "free will", with the only consequence being his torturing you for eternity if that free will is used contrary to what He see's as right? Why did God (the Christian one, anyway) say one thing in the old testament, only to send his Son here to tell us - "no, it's not that way, it's this way"? Why would God treat his own creations with disease, destruction, and war? The whole "Satan" thing just doesn't work... If an all powerful perfect being created a perfect world, and one of his creations destroyed the perfection, they would use that power to eliminate the creation that destroyed the perfection, and restore the previously perfect creation to it's optimal state.... Only God just decided to let us rot in eternal torture because of his failure to protect his "greatest creation?"
If anybody can give me sound, logical arguments to any of these questions, I'd love to hear them.
Ken at 10:48AM on Oct 23rd 2007
20. Christianity is responsible for democracy? Someone needs to give DD a history lesson. Democracy is not only non-Christian, it's PRE-Christian. It would be true to say that some of the big thinkers who helped formed modern democratic societies were Christians. Others were deists. But the fundamental roots of democracy come from GREECE! Specifically Athens (along with to a much lesser extent the idea of the rights of citizens defined in a constitution from Sparta)
And yes DD, Quakers were important to anti-slaver y thinking. But MOST slave owners of the period believed keeping slaves was justified by the bible.
Man, his view of history is so selective.
Grant at 10:55AM on Oct 23rd 2007
21. Another thoughtful essay from a very intelligent man. Thank you, and please continue your fine work Mr. Dsouza.
CK at 10:55AM on Oct 23rd 2007
22. Actually as time goes on and despite the last gasps of superstition, it is inevitable that people will rely less and less on unsybstantiated beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence produced by scientific inquiry. The fact that superstitious beliefs still flourish given a world population of 6 billion and rising fast is not surprising. Whta is somewhat surprising is the great number of educated people such as you who still cling to these absurd and somewhat intellectually embarrasing beliefs. It evidences the difficulty encountered in trying to free the human mind from such nonsense. It will take a long time but when jesus doesn't come back and when catastrophies on a massive scale continue to happen, radomly killing the innocent with the guilty that understanding will finally come that there is no master planner who is intervening in human affairs.
eric at 11:00AM on Oct 23rd 2007
23.
Here's what you want us to believe...
God, the perfect being, created (originally?) two planes of existence - One in which he lives, surrounded by angels who sing his praises to him all day, 24/7. Then, he creates a perfect world, puts 2 people on it, and tells them "do whatever you want, just don't touch this ONE THING. Then, one of his singers gets tired of singing, and wants to take over. So this perfect being, rather than eliminate the "insurgent", decides to create another plane of existence, where eternal torture is the norm. The insurgent decides to get even, and goes to plane of existence #2, to destroy a) the garden of perfection, or b) the beings he thinks God loves more. So God takes his fury out on the beings that the insurgent used to get back at him, sending them to the plane of existence he created to punish the insurgent.....
And it just keeps getting weirder, and more bizarre from there. Is God a great, benevolent wise being, or a sadist?
Ken at 11:13AM on Oct 23rd 2007
24. The claim that Christianity was responsible for the growth of science is well, let's just say, not completely true. At the risk of sounding slightly chauvinistic, it was Indians who taught the world how to count, which is the calcium in the backbone of science, which gives it its rigidity and rigour. (The Arabs carried it to the West, they did not invent it..of course, they have made tremendous contributions to mathematics later.) Modern Science did not develop in any one country, much less within one religion. Democracy was present in India at the time of Ashoka the Great (who was Buddhist and who spread Buddhism to the rest of South Asia without using a sword.) Principles of democracy and non-violence are a part of Jainism and Buddhism (which are really evolutionary beliefs systems, evolved from Hinduism, which is not a religion at all, but that's a digression). Slavery was, as far as I remember, hardly ever, if at all, practiced in India.
I am giving examples of India only because I know them best. Dinesh claiming that Christianity is responsible for all of it is ridiculous, especially since he would have learnt some of these facts about his native land.
Just what are you trying to prove, Dinesh? How do you manage to get your facts wrong almost every time to suit your fixed perceptions? I am not saying that the Indic religions did everything right and Christianity was/is all wrong. I am just saying that you, sir, are writing which comes under the heading of 'Nonsense'. Thank you for providing this entertainment. That's why I come back to this blog.
Nandan Pandit at 11:15AM on Oct 23rd 2007
25. It is the Pat Robertson wackos that continue to give Christianity a bad name. These fundamentalists want to stop all scientific progress - from stem cell research to the teaching of evolution.
The Creationist Museum in Kentucky espouses such nonsense - this is a multi million dollar museum, not some cheapo museum. It contains such wonderful sights as dinonaurs and people living together in harmony and has states that everything we have been taught about evolution is false.
And you wonder why people get disillusioned with religion?
David S. at 11:17AM on Oct 23rd 2007
26. To say that the Christian church is the backbone of western science is like saying the KKK is the leader of race relations. It is ignorant and in most cases completely the opposite. You mention Galileo being a priest. The same Galileo who was jailed and threatened with death by the church for disproving a geocentric universe?! These arguments are so far out in left field I don’t know how anyone could take you seriously!
Ross at 11:23AM on Oct 23rd 2007
27. "Why does this guy hate atheists so much?"
That is what I am wondering as well. What is so threatening about atheists that this guy hates them so much? That we don't buy into his exponentially larger 'moral code'? That we don't believe in superstitions and things that cannot be put in front of our faces (which everyone should take after us in doing!)?
What is it about atheists that threatens Dinesh so freaking much?....... I know: It's that if everyone turned to atheism and realized that there is really no such thing as 'good' and 'evil', he couldn't fear people into not being sexually active very early, not fear people into working themselves to death, etc.
Christopher at 1:28PM on Oct 23rd 2007
28. As always, the same angry mob of atheists waiting the moment to gang up on everything DD writes about. How many of you would love to just shut him up. You see that is precisely the problem with some of you. There is no way you can respect someone's opinion if it is different to yours especially if it's a Christian (God forbid). After all Christians are ignorant idiots who just happen to be in your way to take over the world with your elite and illuminated thinking. Anybody that doesn't have the education and the "right" way of thinking should just shut up and let the smart ones tell us how to do government, religion, science, medicine and everything else. You guys are so perfect yet; you have no real answers for the purpose of life, no tolerance for other opinions and offer nothing but rationality. Id like to see some of you help someone in their time of need like when someone has lost a child or a spouse, or how about give hope to someone who is in deep depression. You can’t help people in situations like this with rationality; logical arguments can only get you so far. You think you can just explain things away, so they stop bothering you. I know many of you are mad at Christians because many times they don’t properly represent the God they serve, but who are you to judge them for doing (just as you) what they think is right? Who said Christians should be perfect? The Bible doesn’t say that at all, as a matter of fact Paul said that “sin lived in him”. You guys are going about this completely wrong, the first Christians spread so rapidly because they were so harshly persecuted, one historian said that the blood of Christians were the seeds that bloomed new Christians wherever they were killed. The more you persecute Christians for what they believe in, the more they will thrive. Death made them stronger, atheism will make them better.
shiningstarxport at 11:53AM on Oct 23rd 2007
29. Nandan, that is not entirely true. Ashoka started out as a bloody warlord who, according to legend, changed his ways after seeing what his war of conquest did to a quasi-democratic city. And while history records this led to his conversion to Buddhism, and he is supposed to have ruled by that point using the principle of buddhist compassion, and that slavery was, although not completely, abolished, the fact is that Ashoka governed as a king. It might not have been a violent dictatorship, but it was still a dictatorship. It most certainly was not a democracy.
Grant at 12:03PM on Oct 23rd 2007
30. @Dlaz in 11. Yes, do read the Bible. Here are a few gems:
-God annihilates all life on earth
-God fears that Nimrod might build a really tall ziggurat, and creates the language barrier
-Abraham, Hero of the Horde, pimps his wife
-Jacob Israel, Hero of the Horde, scams people left and right, believes that his Ringstraked Rods can affect allele frequencies, and beats the crap out of god in a wrestling match.
-A bunch of "slaves" despoil Egypt after the fallout of a volcanic eruption, and in forty years are capable of endless genocides (unless the enemy has iron chariots, in which case even god can't help them)
-Joshua, not content with the normal length of a fighting day, has the earth's rotation stopped
-Hezekiah won't stop there; given the option to speed up the earth, he insists that its rotation be reversed
-Elisha, intolerant of taunts about his age and baldness, sics two bears on a bunch of teenagers
-Another prophet disguises himself as a soldier, and damns a fellow troop to die because the fellow troop wouldn't injure HIM in battle on completely random demand
-David and Solomon are said to have had an army ten times the size of Rome
-Sennacherib's army is said to have been "owned" by god... but neither history nor Sennacherib seem to know about it
-Jesus is said to have fed five thousand men (not counting women and children) with five loaves of bread and two fish. Of course, this man who can conjure food at will and attract Galilean crowds the size of Legions is of no interest to the Jew-hating Pontius Pilate (not yet at least?) nor to the pragmatic Legio Decis Fretensis.
sandslice at 12:03PM on Oct 23rd 2007